Adam Richardson of Envision Internet Consulting has been a long-time collaborator and good friend of mine, and over the last few years I’ve seen him pursue knowledge in web programming with persistence that I’ve never seen from anyone else.

One of Adam’s projects is Nephtali: a web framework that focuses on security and considers the usability of the framework itself. Adam has labored over details in his latest version of Nephtali that will make life better for developers. For instance, he planned the naming convention and namespaces for functions so that in an IDE like NetBeans, the functions appear grouped logically in an easy-to-access format.

Nephtali is up to version 3.0.5 at the time of this writing, and the earlier versions were completely Object Oriented PHP. In version 3, Adam re-thought Nephtali away from the OOP base and rewrote it utilizing FP, Functional Programming.

For the last month or so, Adam has been lobbying various hosts to upgrade to PHP 5.3 or higher, because Nephtali requires at least that version. It is right on the cutting edge. I asked Adam a few questions about Nephtali, and that dialogue follows.

Davin: Nephtali requires the latest version of PHP, version 5.3 or higher, but many hosting providers don’t provide that yet. What about PHP 5.3 is worth waiting for?

Adam: PHP 5.3 includes many enhancements and bug fixes, but the features that facilitated Nephtali’s general approach and architecture were support for namespaces and the new Functional Programming (FP) capabilities.

Davin: I’m familiar with object oriented programming, but you’re talking about “functional programming.” Can you summarize the difference, and explain why you decided to go with FP instead of OOP with Nephtali?

Adam: Most programming languages offer the ability to define functions, however that doesn’t necessarily make them functional programming languages.  It’s easy to to get into flame wars over what a “true” functional language is, but I’ll lay out some general principles:

• Functions can be passed around just like other datatypes.
• Closures allow variables that are in scope when a function is declared to be accessed and carried around within the function.
• Side effects (changing the value of a variable within a function) are limited.
• Many FP languages natively support currying (the ability to define a subset of a functions arguments and then allow other functions to finish defining the others.)

PHP now supports the first 2, and with some discipline, you can limit the impact of side-effects within your code (there are even some clever hacks for the currying issue.)  But the big question is, “What does this buy you?”

Simplicity.

Object Oriented Programming (OOP) bundles variables with the functions (methods) that directly interact with the variables.  This does provide a degree of encapsulation, as the accessor methods make sure that instance and class variables contain what is expected.  However, the issue often isn’t “What” a variable is changed to, but rather  “When” a variable is changed.  This problem of “When” is most glaring for OOP developers when implementing parallel processing, an issue that has produced many complex, clunky answers.

Taking an FP approach simplifies the question of “When”, as you move from a paradigm of altering variables to one of acting on values returned from functions.  Relatively speaking when following general FP conventions, writing unit tests is simple, writing parallel processing apps is simple (see Scala, Clojure, Erlang, etc.), and as it turns out, writing a capable web framework is simple, too.

Davin: What about models? So many of us in the web field have become familiar with the MVC (model, view, controller) architecture in frameworks, and it seems like Nephtali doesn’t use the models concept at all. Is that right, and if so, what do you do about databases?

Adam: Simplicity.

In terms of DB interaction, I like PHP’s PDO capabilities and security.  Performing simple DB work is easy in Nephtali, as you can generate code very quickly using the Nedit, the online code generator for Nephtali.  Nephtali provides some simple enhancements (functions that automatically table inserts, updates, and deletes; easy connection management; etc.), but you’re always working close enough to the basic PDO capabilities that it’s still very easy to perform transactions, connect to multiple DB’s, work with existing tables that don’t follow particular naming conventions, and whatever else your unique environment may entail.  One line of code is all it takes to grab a set of rows from a DB.

Second, utilizing the parallel processing capabilities of CURL, Nephtali provides some special capabilities for web requests.  A couple lines of code can retrieve a web request (in parallel with any other web requests) and format the retrieved data into whatever container (object or array) you’d like.

Davin: I saw the post on the Nephtali blog about Nephtali’s parallel processing for web requests. Can you explain when that would be useful, and when I should not run ahead and parallel process everything?

Adam: If you have a page that only makes use of one web service, you don’t gain anything.  However, if you have a page like Nephtali’s homepage, which makes a request to Google Code for the latest download and also makes a request to the WordPress blog for recent entries, you can gain a significant performance improvement by processing those requests in parallel.  Instead of ending up with serial calls to the two services (GoogleCodeRequestTime + WordPressRequestTime), the parallel request now equals the greater of the two requests (GoogleCodeRequestTime -OR- WordPressRequestTime.)

Nephtali handles the processing for you automatically.  Always use the request() and response() functions, and Nephtali will make things faster when they can be faster.  That’s it.

More about Nephtali

Learn more about Nephtali at nephtaliproject.com. When you’re there, check out the screencasts on using Nephtali. One of the great features on that site is NEdit, a tool that you can use to write up a lot of the code you’ll need for Nephtali pages.

Oh, and don’t hesitate to use the contact form. Adam loves talking with people about Nephtali, and I’m sure he’ll happily answer questions or respond to comments about the framework.